Why Astrolicious?

This thought piece clarifies my - alexanderniebuhr - personal view and opinions. It is not meant to represent the opinion of every Astrolious member, but it still sets our vision and all members holding a role should stand behind it.

How it all started

There was some discussions in the Astro Discord way back at the end of 2023, about the idea of having a more “unofficial official” initiative to support community projects.

Past efforts didn’t work out, and having everything scattered creates some challenges. Users might not adopt community projects, because they don’t have a way to validate if a project is well maintained or of high quality. The dream was born: A unofficial trusted source for communitiy projects, where users can be assured that the projects are well maintained, following a high quality standard and are safe to use.

This should prevent attacks on the dependency chain and benefit Astro itself. Why? Well Astro is great and we all love it, in matter a fact we love it so much that we all invest time to make community resources to explore new opportunities, support more use-cases or just share solutions with others. I personally think the correct way for any crazy idea is to try it out as a community project, and have it adopted upstream when time has come. Community means trying ideas, sharing passion and love, and working together to drive adoption.

Strive to make Astro better

So we outlined that community projects are very important for an open-source ecosystem, but we still need to make sure we don’t loose the focus here. We are not doing this to be competitive, gain stars, or get rich. Our passion and motivation is to make Astro better, we try to make Astro more adoptable, allow exploration, and push experimentation.

A dedicated initiative allows Astro to breathe and grow. And even if we all have a lot of passion and entusiasm towards Astrolicious, we still prioritize Astro. We do not exist to kill Astro, we exist because of Astro.

How we differ from Astro?

We shape our target audience very clearly and it’s important to understand how we differ from Astro. While we do have some projects under our umbrella which target Astro users, because those project can be added to their site, we mainly focus on a different group of people.

Astrolicious is targeted towards integration authors, theme authors and contributors of community projects. Astro has also a channel for them and it is very important that we keep communication and connection between both places.

However we are able to provide a more focused and tailored place. Integartion authors, theme authors and contributors of community projects can go further and dive deeper with Astrolicious in addition to still engaging with Astro.

Which Discord is for me?

It looks confusion first, but we promise it’s super easy to understand. First things first, if you are not a member of the Astro Discord, you need to stop reading, join us.

Everyone engaging with Astrolicious should be on the Astro Discord. We work actively against splitting the community. The Astro Discord was, is, and always will be the first station to go to for our Astro community. And if you just build your own Astro site, you won’t need the Astrolicious Discord at all.

The Astrolicious Discord is targeted towards integration authors, theme authors, and contributors of our community projects. We will not have support for our projects, because Astro has a very helpful and active #support channel for that. In addition to that, if you are looking for advice how to start your first integration or theme, the #integration channel is the perfect start and in most cases everything you need, only if you feel the need to dive deeper, you can join the Astrolicious server to dive deeper.

A Astrolicious Project?

Sometimes we do question ourselves, is this idea a Astrolicious project? We welcome every submission and are exited to see the interested, so we will discuss every submission and idea. But we can give some outline to help you.

If your idea is not an integration, a theme/template or a project which can be used and added by others to their Astro site, it’s most likely that it doesn’t fit Astrolicious very well. We suggest you create the project on your personal GitHub Account and share it in the #showcase channel and bring it into the Astro Discord.

However if your idea is an integration, a theme/template and you want to benefit from a shared group of maintainers all working on your idea, than Astrolicious might be a good place for your idea, but if you plan to maintain it yourself, maybe you don’t need Astrolicious.

And in the case where you are a Astro maintainer, as well as an Astrolicious member, we would like to encourage you to think about your idea carfully. Does it help/benefit integration authors, theme authors or does it deserve being suggested inside Astro Discord to get more visibility. If we do want to start a Astro community project which is clearly Astro and not Astrolicious, we should not put the Astrolicious label on it, we will propose and work on that as Astro maintainers, inside the Astro Discord. If in doubt choosing the Astro Discord first, is always the safest bet.

Post Mortem

We only succeed if Astro succeeds and get’s stronger every day. We do work on that goal together daily and would love to invite you too. Whenever you feel concerns or are unsure about anything, please reach out to us., we want to make this very clear and make sure everyone sees our vision.